A college friend who turned on Ross Ulbricht as part of a deal with the U.S. government told jurors Thursday that Mr. Ulbricht did create and run online drug bazaar Silk Road, in some of the most incriminating testimony so far in the trial. Read More »

Ross Ulbricht is in federal court in Manhattan this week to defend himself against accusations that he was the mastermind behind Silk Road, a website that allegedly sold illegal goods like cocaine and fake driver’s licenses to buyers around the world. Read More »

Last year, the Journal told readers about Cody Wilson’s efforts to take the virtual currency off the grid through a project called Dark Wallet, the 26-year-old’s latest effort to use technology to sidestep the government. Mr. Wilson is most famous for creating the first working gun made by a 3-D printer.

After months of programming, Wilson and his partner, British anarchist Amir Taaki, also 26, are releasing an early version of the software for free download. It will work as an add-on for Google’s Chrome browser. Read More »

Anyone who thinks the failure of the bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox spells doom for the crypto-currency should meet the pack of self-described anarchists that gathered in the basement of Brave New Books in Austin on Sunday. Read More »

Even drug dealers working from the relative obscurity of the Internet can get robbed.

After authorities this fall took down Silk Road, the online black market, numerous copycats popped up to take its place. One of them, named Sheep Marketplace, told users it was shutting down this weekend after someone made off with its merchants’ stored Bitcoins – possibly more than $40 million worth of the virtual currency, according to some estimates.

Black Market Reloaded, another Silk Road successor, announced shortly after that it will begin to shutter itself as well. “Sheep went down and BMR can’t stand,” its administrator, known as “backopy,” said in a message to users. Read More »

More than three years before the U.S. government arrested Ross Ulbricht, the alleged ringleader of the Internet drug market the Silk Road, he wanted to squash inflation inside video game economies, according to documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

The documents – slides touting a potential startup — offer an insight into Ulbricht’s thinking. They suggest that if Ulbricht was the man behind the Silk Road, he viewed it just as much as an experiment in unregulated markets as a source of thousands of bitcoins – the virtual currency used on the Silk Road.

In 2010, Ulbricht, now 29, pitched a startup incubator in Austin, Texas, on how to create a more stable economic engine for game worlds. The virtual money supply would be constant, time playing a game would translate into production of virtual goods and those goods could be exchangeable through some sort of currency.

Ulbricht sometimes called it “Greenspan Games,” a nerdy jab at Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, a person who saw the presentation said. Read More »

The Federal Bureau of Investigation shutdown of Silk Road, a secretive Internet marketplace for drugs, was seen as a dark moment for bitcoin. The faddish virtual currency was in heavy use on Silk Road.

Felix Salmon at Reuters, though, had a different take: The Silk Road takedown could end up a boon for bitcoin, since it removes “the single skeeviest aspect” of the currency.

In other words, for anybody wanting to see the broader adoption of bitcoin, the shuttering of Silk Road should be considered a necessary and very welcome step — and one which will help support its value over the medium term. Sure, the price fell today — but not egregiously so: it was about $140 in the morning, briefly fell as far as $110, and is now back to $125. By bitcoin standards, that’s a surprisingly low amount of volatility on a big-news day. And with Silk Road gone, a significant source of downside tail risk has now been effectively removed from the bitcoinverse.

Federal agents in San Francisco arrested the alleged ringleader Tuesday of a secretive Internet drug market known as the “Silk Road,” seizing $3.6 million in digital currency, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Wednesday.

The case offers fresh evidence that the U.S. government can sometimes track down cybercriminals even if they use advanced encryption techniques and other methods meant to keep Internet traffic anonymous.

Since 2011, Ross Ulbricht, 29 years old, who goes by the name “Dread Pirate Roberts,” allegedly administered a black market bazaar that sold illegal drugs and computer viruses to anonymous customers. The system relied on Bitcoin, an Internet currency that allows buyers to remain secret. Silk Road counted hundreds of thousands of users, federal agents said, and Ulbricht allegedly collected commission from their sales.

The government has shut down Silk Road, according to the complaint. Visitors will now be greeted by a red and white landing page with the text: “THIS HIDDEN SITE HAS BEEN SEIZED.” Read More »